Good With People

It's been way too long since I put any fiction up, so I thought I'd share this little bit I wrote back in May.  It was a story seed that arose from a discussion about the sorts of people you'd want on your Team in case of Zombie Apocalypse (my Special Forces brother is 100% my Team Leader, so I'll be just fine), and after listing a variety of specializations (hunter, gardener, spinner, carpenter, etc), I was feeling like I'd more or less be dead weight.  The only thing I might have going for me is, in the immortal words of Martin Blank, "a certain... moral flexibility".  Which immediately got my writer's brain a'spinnin' about how White Collar Peeps might survive the Apocalypse, and I sat down and pounded out the following.  And then left it there, because I didn't actually have an idea for a narrative, just the characters for what would essentially be a glorified fanfiction of myself (in which my stand-in is way more bad ass than me, and those inspired by others in my life are slightly less so, so as to make more room for my stand-in's bad-assery).  I recently had a conversation that kicked off a tentative idea for what the point of the story might be (hence this was back on my mind again) so we'll see.  I'd like to do NaNo again this year, all 50k words since I'm on Parental Leave, so maybe I'll use that time to dive deep on this one...

Anyway, enjoy this unearthed noodling, and hopefully there will be more fiction in the near future!

***

The Apocalypse happened about fifteen years ago, while my mother was pregnant with me.  I don’t remember life Before, and my brother- four years older than me- doesn’t really, although occasionally he’ll surprise me by having a personal familiarity with something like “milkshake”.

We don’t live “near” anyone.  No one does, these days. Well, some people do, people trying to rebuild the Cities, but Daddy says they’re short-memoried idiots.  But there’s about a handful of us families that look in on one another, none closer than about five miles, and we all get together about once a month for trading and courting and that kind of thing.  Mama says they’ve all been carefully vetted, they’re all the “right” kind of people, by which she means sensible folk. My brother says dryly that the Apocalypse did a pretty good job vetting our species in general, but talk like that always makes Mama angry.

“There were a lot of good people who died, a lot of smart people who just got unlucky,” she’ll say.  “Not to mention the smart people who got lucky enough to survive, but were a hell of a lot worse for us than the dumb ones who died.”

Daddy says we were smart, and that’s why we made it through the Bad Years.  Mama says we were smart, but also lucky.  “Being smart just lets you take advantage of good luck when it comes along,” she says.  “And good luck comes more often to those who don’t count on it.”

“Smart, and lucky, and ruthless,” Daddy will say, and kiss Mama.  Mama says nothing. I know she considers being ruthless part of being smart.  And I know she considers the biggest piece of luck having been married to Daddy.  Daddy is the one who knew how to survive in a world suddenly stripped of modern technology.  Sure, it was theoretical knowledge, knowledge he’d gleaned from a passionate interest in history, but between the two of them they turned theory into practice, and even refined it in places.  And Daddy’s the surer shot when it comes to hunting anything on the move. Mama has said multiple times that we might have survived without him, but we never would have been so comfortable.  Daddy always says we’d have done just fine.

“There’s no stopping your mother, boys,” he’ll say.  “Once she puts her mind to a thing, it gets done.”

Daddy used to work with computers, before the Apocalypse.  People would have problems with their computers, and he’d use his to fix them.  He’s explained it to us a couple of times, but it’s sort of hard to understand. And Daddy says there’s really not much point in trying to understand, because we’re not likely to get computers back on any sort of a widespread scale anytime soon, and even if we did, they’ll be different.

Mama was something called a financial planner, which she says was even more worthless than what Daddy did.  “I made a lot of money helping people prepare for retirement,” she says. “But when the Apocalypse made money obsolete, it became apparent that all I really did was tell stories.”

Mama is good at telling stories, tho’, and she’s a super-good planner, so I’m sure she was good at her job, even if there’s no such thing as “retirement” anymore.

Mama had a passing interest in history, but not like Daddy.  She always liked art and literature and philosophy best, which she says are all very important things to individuals and societies, but not very good for building shelter or putting food in our bellies.  She’s much better with people than Daddy is, tho’. Better at charming them, better at bargaining with them.

Better at killing them, when it needs to be done.

Stained Pt. 2

Erin returned quickly enough that I figured she must have dog-trotted through the complex to the med quarters, where Sully slept.  The man in question looked remarkably well put-together for such an early visit, but then I realized that he would have been up before dawn.

“What is it?” He asked, all brisk business in his role as Councilman.   I squashed a memory of him as a gap-toothed, skinned-knee kid asking me if he could touch my gun.  He was Sulaiman to the people of the complex, not Sully.  Which is why I was always careful to keep that nickname to myself.

“I want to take a closer look at that zombie out there,” I said, and gave Erin a look that indicated she should offer up her rifle so Sully could take a closer look.  She did so, and so did he.

“Those marks aren’t natural,” he said, almost immediately.

“Nothing about zombies is natural,” I grinned, and he looked at me long enough to roll his eyes.

“I mean they’re not indicative of any disease I’ve studied, nor do they look like any sort of organism that might grow on decaying flesh.”

“So you’re saying I can catch it?”

He gave me an appalled look.  “Catch it?  No, I’m absolutely not saying that.  I’m saying we can shoot it in the head and you can study the remains in the field, should you so desire.”

“There are markings on the head,” I protested.  “I want to look at them first, maybe do some sketches, and then I’ll put it down, promise.”

“Absolutely not.  We’re not taking a chance like that for something as puerile as curiosity.”

I arched a brow at him and said, “Erin, will you give us a moment?”  Eyes wide, she nodded and carefully traced her steps back towards the stairs.

“Since when is curiosity puerile?” I hissed as soon as I was sure she was out of earshot.  “Your father would turn in his grave to hear you spout such anti-intellectual bullshit.”

Sully’s face flushed.  “I didn’t intend-”

“I don’t care what you did or didn’t intend.  I’m older and meaner than you, and I’m just as familiar with the risk of a live zombie, even one that’s obviously starving and half-frozen.  I won’t bring it inside the walls, but I want to take a closer look at it before I blow the back of it’s head off.  Which I will.  You know I will, Sully.”

Sully looked away.  He did indeed know I would.  Anyone who could put down their own newly-infected best friend wasn’t going to hesitate to put down a stranger’s corpse- not even an intriguing, mark-covered stranger.  He stared out at the zombie and sighed.

“The rest of the Council-”

“The rest of the Council is also younger and less mean than I am,” I countered.  “And they aren’t here.  I only asked for your input- your input, mind you, not your permission- because you’re better with disease than I am.  You confirmed that it’s not diseased, and that’s all I needed.  But then you had to tell me ‘no’ in front of a youngling.  And what did I always tell you about giving orders?”

“Not to give ones you know won’t be obeyed,” he said grudgingly.

“Right.  Now, I’ll forgive your momentary lapse of judgment because you’re young yet,” Sully snorted at this, as well he should: 55 was considered well-seasoned in this cruel new world of ours.  “But we need to call Erin back up here so you can publicly give me the permission that I don’t actually need.”

“You’re a pain in my ass, old-timer, you know that?” He muttered.  I smiled.

“Well maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll bite me.”

Sully shuddered.  “Don’t say that.  Not even in jest.  If you turned so close-”

I placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.  “Sully, if it bites me, I’ll blow my own head off before any of the rest of you can blink.  I swear it on your father’s grave.”

Stained

I haven't had much time to write lately (more on that in a few days) but this evening I found myself with a spare hour, and feeling giddy with the possibility of it all.  I had a little story seed hit me in the head this afternoon, so I wrote it out, and started poking it with a stick to see what might come of it.

This is the beginning of it, with more percolating in my brain as I type (but I need to get to bed):

***

There aren’t many zombies left these days, but we keep patrol, regardless.  After all, it only takes one, and enough of us of us are old enough to remember what it was like during the First Panic to not want to take any chances, impassable walls or not.  Every day, every night, high summer or dead winter, five of us stand sentry, one on each wall, and we look out across the landscape for any signs of movement.  Sometimes we see something- and usually it’s a perfectly living nomad, sometimes a peddler, or even a caravan.  Very, very occasionally, it’s a zombie, usually moving pretty slowly by that point.  We let it get close, just to make sure it’s not leading anything else in (and, honestly, to make disposable a bit easier), and then we snipe it.  Usually two of us take the shot.  Some might call that a waste of bullets, but I say it pays to be sure.  Plus back when we only did one shot, we always knew exactly who killed it.  Which was fine until the day Pietor discovered he’d killed his long-missing sister.  What was left of her, anyway.  Yeah, we all know intellectually that zombies aren’t the people whose bodies they animate, but hearts don’t always care what brains know, and nightmares rarely consult the forebrain.

Anyway I was on the northeast wall, stomping my feet to ward off the cold and mentally encouraging dawn- and my replacement- to hurry up, when I caught sight of a flutter out on the horizon.  In a way the northeast wall is one of the easiest to patrol, because there’s nothing in that direction, just flat land as far as the eye can see.  To the northwest is similar, except there’s a lake to take into consideration.  West holds more lake, east  gets the rolling hills, and of course to the south is the forest.  In the early days we always had three people patrolling the south wall, because the forest likes to play tricks.

I squinted and leaned out over the parapet, not entirely certain it hadn’t been a low-flying bat.  The sky was lightening by that point, and whatever it was remained a black smudge against the blue ink of the horizon.  Not a swooping bat, then.  I hefted my rifle up to my shoulder so I could use the glass for a better view.

Human-shaped, whatever it was.  Time would tell if it was alive or not, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t: something about the gait said it was shuffling in a way that had nothing to do with being footsore.  Zombies slowed down when they were hungry, and they slowed down even more in the cold.  That’s why so many of us lived so far north these days; longer winters.  I’d heard rumors that the lands near the equator were damn near uninhabitable, because nothing ever cooled off, let alone froze over.  And nevermind what that kind of heat did to decaying flesh.  The mental image of soupy zombies, more liquid than solid, was guaranteed to turn my stomach every time.

I sighed deeply and settled in for a long wait.  At that speed whatever it was wouldn’t get close until after my watch was over, but if it really was a zombie, they’d need a second gun, anyway, so I might as well stay put.  And in the meantime, I checked on it periodically through the glass.

Before much longer Erin joined me on the wall, saying nothing but holding out a steaming mug.  I accepted the tea and jerked my chin out at the middle distance, where my “something” had resolved itself very definitely into a zombie.

“Got us some target practice,” I said.  “Something odd about it, tho’.  Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Erin raised an eyebrow, then her rifle.

“Huh,” she said at last, and I could almost hear her squint.

“You see it too?” I asked.  She dropped the rifle.

“Yeah.  The skin looks… off.  Not like, rotting or peeling or any of the stuff you’d expect to see, just… weird.”

I nodded, satisfied that it wasn’t just me.  “Yeah.  Almost like it’s got markings.”

“Like tattoos?”  She peered through her glass again.  “Who would tattoo their face like that?”

“Maori,” I muttered.

“Who?”  Erin didn’t look away from the zombie, and I could tell she wasn’t that interested.  She was an adult, but young yet- only about sixteen.  She’d been born long after the First Panic, and her knowledge and experience had a lot more to do with survival in all it’s many forms than in cultures halfway around the world.  Still, I’d need to have a word with our teachers.

“We’ll talk about it later.  But it’s not just the face that’s tattooed, I don’t think.”

“Huh!  Well I’ll be damned.  I thought it was a patterned shirt.”

I looked through my own glass, trying to make sense of the dark and light patterns on the creature’s arms and torso.  Legs, too.  “Nope.  That’s what really convinced me it was dead: no one living would be walking around out there with so little clothing on.”

“You figure it’s close enough to put down yet?”  There was a touch of anxiousness in Erin’s voice.  This was her third patrol, and the first zombie we’d seen in over a year.

“Yeah, but I want to wait a little longer.  I want to figure out what’s going on with that skin.  Go fetch Sulaiman for me.”

That she didn’t argue with me showed how nervous she really was.  If she was older, or more experienced, she might have said something about plague, although it was rare for a zombie to be carrying one.  But she probably didn’t even realize that was a possibility.  Sulaiman, however, had trained under his doctor father, was on the council of five, and would have plenty to say about me letting an odd looking zombie get close to the walls.  I didn’t think it was diseased, tho’... but I did want another pair of experienced eyes on it.

Lucinda

Clarissa's younger sister:

Also mid-1800s

Lucinda is supposed to be more classically beautiful than Clarissa- and also much more romantic than her practical older sister.  But they love one another dearly, and get along exceedingly well.

Clarissa

I watched a few episodes of The Walking Dead tonight, which put me in mind of my zombie story.  And thus I did an illustration of Clarissa, the narrator of that tale:

Mid 1800s

Maybe I'll draw Lucinda tomorrow.

The Best ("Our Special Diet")

“My sister and I require a special diet. I tell you this only because I wish it to be made aware to the household that we do not eat apart from haughtiness or spite, but out of concern for the wellbeing of others. When we were younger we contracted a rare illness, which has left us with a dependency on special herbs for our strength. These herbs are the most unpleasant poison to those who have never had the illness, and we would hate for anyone to come to harm because they ever-so-innocently took a mouthful of our stew. They are not deadly, but they might make a person wish for death until they pass from the system. I do, of course, keep our private herbs locked away separately from what gets used in the kitchen.”

Mrs. White was silent for a moment, nostrils flaring in that way I would come to learn meant she was thinking of how to most tactfully phrase something. Finally she said,

“Your illness… you say you had it when you were very young? It does not now affect you, beyond the need for special herbs?” I understood immediately what she was getting at, and quickly changed my story to one closer to the truth.

“I may have misspoke when I called it an illness, ma’am. The truth is that my sister and I were bitten by a venomous animal, and it is the lingering effects of that animals’ poison which cause the weakness. It is not, to the best of my knowledge, communicable. You may ask the sisters, if you feel uneasy- we spent two years living in close quarters with the other children, and none were ever affected by our condition.” None of the living, at any rate.

Mrs. White nodded her acceptance of my explanation, and I noticed her whole posture become slightly less rigid. By the end of our interview she was quite warm towards me, and I could see in her a natural sympathy for young women with practical minds (I reminded myself to keep my sister out of her way as much as possible). The whole episode convinced me that it really is for the best if one can stick as close to the truth as one may in any given situation. God favors the honest in spirit.

The Best, Cont.

(I liked yesterday's idea so much that I kept whittling away at it today. The vast majority of what I wrote actually had more to do with world-building and longer story-arc plotting, but here is a bit of a continuation of yesterday's specific narrative.)



I sometimes wonder if I would have bothered, if it had just been me. If it weren’t for my little sister, would I have just allowed myself to… waste away? I think I might have. This, in turn, leads me to think that as awful as it was for my sister to be afflicted along with me, it was probably for the best. After all, I have since seen what happens to our kind if we don’t find the proper sustenance, and it would have been exceptionally unpleasant for all the other denizens of the orphanage. Whereas since I was driven to save her, no matter the cost, I kept both of us in check, and the living children were always quite safe from us.

That first time was necessarily the hardest. Even though we had eaten the stew before, we still had many years’ worth of conditioning that to do so was an abomination. But then I remembered that our Lord had asked- no, He had commanded- that we eat of His flesh, and I comforted myself that it must not be so bad, if it was in the Bible. But I still thought it would be best not to bring it up with anyone else, and when the opportunity arose I took care of all the preparations myself. My sister (and I, for that matter) began to recover immediately, and the nuns were amazed. The stew I made for her was so nourishing that it soon became my regular duty to help in the kitchens, which made things ever so much easier for us to stay well-fed. I know now, of course, that we don’t actually have to cook our food, but at the time the thought never would have occurred to me. And to tell the truth, in the long years we’ve had our special diet, we’ve only resorted to such barbarism in the most extreme of emergencies. So even putting convenience aside, it was really for the best that I ended up helping in the kitchens, since it meant I got to learn many methods of food preparation I otherwise never would have. As it turned out I had a bit of a gift for it, which was to be useful later on in our lives- but you may rest assured that I have never prepared our personal stew for anyone but ourselves.

Well, and for others of our kind, naturally.

The Best

If we hadn't been attacked during the blizzard, I don't know that my sister and I would have survived.

As it was, when the others found us (and what was left of our parents) they assumed we'd been set upon by wild animals, and they did their best to nurse us back to health. When I think on it now it's almost heart-breakingly pathetic- three small families facing down death by starvation in a blizzard, and rather than do the obvious thing with two girls who have been mauled in such circumstances, they actually tried to save us. I'm sure they'd even have wasted energy on giving a proper burial to our parents, if the ground hadn't been too hard to dig. As it was they simply covered them with the remnants of our tent. Of course, leaving them unburied was probably for the best, all things considered.

Everyone had already been reduced to 1/3 rations by the time we were attacked- but I know the adults must have gone with even less, in an attempt to heal us. And then there was no food, and we sipped on heated snow.

And then there was a meat stew, and it was the best thing I'd ever tasted, and we got strong again. So strong. Much stronger than we should have. But no one was paying any attention to us by that point- they were all too wrapped up in their own guilt, their own gods.

We were rescued, of course. Everyone knows that, has read it in the papers. Maybe if things had been different, one of those other families might have adopted us, but I don't think any of them could stand to raise us, knowing what had happened to our parents.

Again, this was probably for the best.

We had been in the orphanage not three days when I noticed my sister picking listlessly at her food. She was pale, thin-looking. Perhaps this was to be expected from a child who had been rescued from near-starvation, but I knew that just one week ago she had been flushed and full of life. Finally she shoved the bowl away from her.

"It's not good," she muttered to me.

"I know it doesn't taste good, but it's all we've got," I said. And it didn't taste good. It wasn't that the porridge it tasted bad, exactly. But it was sort of like eating grass- you could do it, but it just seemed strange. It surprised me to see the other children wolfing it down so enthusiastically.

"No, I mean it's not good for me," she said, looking up at me with dark eyes. "I can tell. I may as well be eating air. I eat and I eat and I eat and I'm never even a little bit full- I'm hungry all the time."

"Me too," I admitted. "But we've been hungrier than this," A lie; the hunger gnawed at my gut worse than it ever had in the blizzard, twisting like a pain-maddened snake. "We'll survive."

"Do you know the last time I was full?" she continued in a dreamy voice, as though I had not spoken. "When we ate the stew. Do you remember the stew?"

"We mustn't talk about that," I scolded. "It upsets people."

"I'm sorry," she was abashed, but I could see the glow of memory in her eyes. I pushed my porridge away as well.

"Let's go for a walk," I said.

***

Nowadays when you read about orphanages in our time, it's all doom and gloom and terrible circumstances. I don't doubt that many orphanages were that way, but ours was not. We were given three meals a day (which were gobbled up by every child but us), were kept in clean, well-mended clothing, slept in comfortable beds, and were encouraged to stay active in body as well as mind. Still, as good as our orphanage was, it was the early 1800s, and child mortality was much higher then than it is now.

Again, this worked out for the best, as far as we were concerned.

Our orphanage was quite large, as I reckoned things. It had three long bedrooms (one for the girls, one for the boys, and one for the nuns); two school-rooms (again, one for the boys and one for the girls); a common-room (where we ate or played if it was cold out); a kitchen (which we turn turns cleaning); and a decent-sized garden in the back. Off to one side of the garden was a small cemetery, which held more than a few miniature graves. Of course no family tended these graves, but some of the children were always romantic enough to want to care for them, so they generally had at least a few blooms.

My sister and I spent a great deal of time in the cemetery, not so much because we had romantic streaks but because it was a good place to get away from every one else. It wasn't that we didn't like the other children, or the sisters, it's just that being around them... agitated us. Especially when we were already feeling so very weak and peevish. I'd heard one of the nuns talking about sending my sister to a hospital, she was getting so thin. I was determined to prevent this separation, but had yet to figure out how. Anyway everyone else was so loud and smelled so strongly- the cemetery was the one place we could go to get relief from that, to clear our heads enough to maybe think a little.

We were sitting by the grave of a boy who had died just before we came to the orphanage (now over a week ago). His stone was still clear and easy to read (John Alfred), and snow in front of it was smoother than the patches around it, unblemished by the many thaws and re-freezings this spring had produced. My sister was more laying than sitting, and I could tell even being awake was costing her more energy than she had. If any of the sisters caught us out here in the cold I'd be switched for sure, for allowing it.

"I'm hungry," she whispered, although by this point it had become such a constant refrain that I barely heard it. It was like the sound of insects in summer, or the fall of water in a brook.

"I know," I murmured, the way one might casually waft a hand at a fly. You didn't expect it to do any good- it was just what you did.

"Clarissa, I'm going to die," she said this with a sort of peace. It wasn't a threat, wasn't a complaint: it was a statement of fact, like it being wet on the ground.

"No you're not," I said, too weary to protest with any more vigor.

"No, I am. I really am." She flailed weakly for my hand, squeezed my fingers with her own. "I'm going to die because food doesn't feed me anymore. I think maybe we did die in that mountain pass, our spirits did, but it's just taken our bodies this long to catch ups."

"That's ridiculous," I closed my eyes. "That's not how death works. And anyway we were strong- our bodies and our spirits were strong, both of them. We're just... we got sick, somehow. We've got a sickness." She was quiet long enough that I thought she'd drifted off to sleep. Then,

"The stew made us strong. The food they tried to give us before that- it didn't help. Nothing helped, until the stew. The stew was the best."

I could say nothing to this. She was right, and I knew she was right. I remembered how life and energy had poured into my limbs with every mouthful. So strong...

"Clarissa, we need more of the stew."